ITT, ancient RUINS, ruined cities, oh look on my works, ye mighty and despair!

http://www.culturefocus.com/syria/pictures/palmyra-6small.jpg

Palmyra

Palenque

http://www.oddee.com/_media/imgs/articles/a101_Palenque1.jpg

http://www.naturephoto-cz.eu/photos/sevcik/palenque-mayan-ruins--mayan-ruins-1.jpg

http://lh4.ggpht.com/_tt5Fzuyo1nc/SB4L64QSJkI/AAAAAAAAFZQ/YLV0lcZgjns/s640/image1-12.jpg

Persepolis

Ephesus, Turkey

http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/00/1b/2e/e4/celso-s-library-ephesus.jpg

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/160/348306257_19eb35196e.jpg

Had to google Palenque, coz yr first link didn't show, but is this the one, with the crazy vaguely pagoda shaped tower?

http://www.crystalinks.com/palenque.jpg

All Hail Chichen Itza

http://desktopnature.com/4271-2/Ancient+Mayan+Ruins_+Chichen+Itza_+Mexico.jpg

Had to google Palenque, coz yr first link didn't show, but is this the one, with the crazy vaguely pagoda shaped tower?

That's it. Palenque is pretty much o_O for off-the-charts Mayan architecture.

http://static.atlasobscura.com/images/place/michigan-central-station.10446.large_slideshow.jpg

Michigan Central Station

http://www.doobybrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/michigan-central-station-jeremy-blakeslee.jpg

MCS FAT

This is all reminding me of one of my little obsessions... GOBEKLI TEPE!!!

http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/Images/countries/Turkish%20pics/Gobeklitemple.jpg

Which might well be (if some historians are to be believed) the place where agriculture and, well, civilization as we know it (t.m.) or at least agriculture was invented!

x-posts NO NO NO NO NO, that's exactly the sort of thing I don't want. ANCIENT, I SAID ANCIENT.

Gobekli Tepe and Jericho and such are really fascinating.

xpost Jimmy, Shut the front door, that is amazing!
Can you go in there?

Yes, I'm sure it's amazing, but it's not a RUIN, it's an abandonned building. Not the same thing at all, and out of the remit of this thread. Pls don't ruin (ha) my beautiful ruin thread.

There was a cool video story on Vice mag's website about Detroit, touring this rundown old theater that was massive inside... I can't think of the name

Oops. Sorry.

We could have some of Heinrich Schliemann's Troy, mind you...

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1431/565852078_aeb2a6de49.jpg

And Jericho's walls...

http://www.howardbloom.net/jericho_wall_color2.jpg

http://www.howardbloom.net/jericho_walls_b&w.jpg

http://img1.photographersdirect.com/img/9915/wm/pd71831.jpg

Great Zimbabwe

Has anyone posted Petra yet?

http://i1.trekearth.com/photos/13735/_dsc3273-petra-web.jpg

the castle that sprung my family line, mayhaps? this is all my grandmother could surmise after extensive research. Turner painted it at some point.

http://www.enchantedtowy.co.uk/Dynevor-Castle-1.gif

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3597/3579570074_3904150827.jpg

Ctesiphon

http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu/classics/history/bronze_age/full/17-10.jpg

Akrotiri, Santorini

The southern borderlands here between England & Wales (where the river Wye is the natural border) contain some utterly remarkable ruins. The comprehensive societal smash of the 11th century is felt all over in this landscape, as nothing says 'we welcome our new religious & cultural overlords' like a fuck-off massive castle, followed by a fuck-off massive abbey, built with carboniferous limestone from the fuck-off massive cliffs.
This is the ruined church of St James, built by monks & still used as a place of Christian worship until 1860 or so, despite it's remote & tricky position at a loop in the river at the bottom of the cliffs.
http://www.roughwood.net/ChurchAlbum/Monmouthshire/Lancaut/LancautImages/LancautStJames2004.jpg
http://www.roughwood.net/ChurchAlbum/Monmouthshire/Lancaut/LancautImages/LancautStJamesWest2004.jpg

There's also a shelf of rock poking out of the river Severn here which has a ruined arch, an early Christain site dedicated to St Twrog and occupied by at least two hermits who received alms in the 1200's.
http://s0.geograph.org.uk/photos/54/56/545622_fd8906a2.jpg

Welsh ruins! Are there some images that are not displaying there?

(I can't remember the name of it, a country house built by a mad English nobleman (weren't they all?) which was supposed to be a picturesque half-ruined folly, but the tower was designed so badly that it fell down and rendered the whole house an actual ruin before the 19th Century was over. Oh what was its name, what am I thinking of?)

― Wheal Dream, Monday, 15 November 2010 14:49 (Yesterday)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonthill_Abbey

THAT IS THE ONE!!! Thank you so much. I was thinking "Fountains Abbey? Fontainbleu Abbey?" I know it was Font something.

Once he demanded that he would eat a Christmas dinner only if it would be served from new abbey kitchens and told his workmen to hurry. The kitchens collapsed as soon as the meal was over.

here are two images of my own to replace the hotlink denied white void in my post. St. James at Lancaut:
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbzf29CBxH1qdu6dfo1_r1_500.jpg
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbzffrDny11qdu6dfo1_500.jpg

No Skara Brae no credibility!

http://www.thealsops.net/pictures/2007082421/IMG_0943.JPG

This is a very cool thread.

Needs more fogous IMO

http://www.geniusloci.co.uk/images/fogou7.jpg

I must have walked pretty much RIGHT PAST this one without even noticing on my way to Zennor.

http://www.yourlocalweb.co.uk/images/pictures/00/09/zennor-quoit-865.jpg

I should probably know the difference between a dolmen

http://www.lookaroundireland.com/armagh/images/Ballykeel_Dolmen.JPG

and an QUOIT

http://www.historic-cornwall.org.uk/a2m/neolithic/chambered_tomb/trethevy_quoit/trethevy_quoit_gcs11689.jpg

Is Quoit just one of those weird Cornish or Southwestern words that they decided to call something which everyone else calls a Dolmen in the rest of the world?

the Agora at Miletus, Anatolia (SW Turkey)

http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/7113/turkeymiletusmiletossun.jpg

Can I just say that as a Scrabble player, I'm very happy that quoits exist.

http://i56.tinypic.com/2lo3jio.jpg

erected by the 2012 Mayan Death Cult Dan Brown Templar NSDAP Atlantean Freemasonic Extraterrestrial Illuminati, according to the History Channel

http://i55.tinypic.com/6pqm4n.jpg

"The Secretary"

http://www.students.sbc.edu/drahman08/images/8.800px-Knossos_bull.jpg

Knossos

Wow, so I get to be first with Baalbek?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/ee/Baalbek-Jupiter.jpg/449px-Baalbek-Jupiter.jpg

And Tyre:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/71/TyreAlMina.jpg/800px-TyreAlMina.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Tyre_Triumphal_Arch.jpg

Rose MaCauley got there before ILE did:

http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/x2/x11546.jpg

A stand in the Hippodrome at Tyre:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2180/2560203957_2ec62fe301.jpg
Terraces at Tyre by gordontour, on Flickr

I'M IN UR ZIGGURAT, DOIN' ZIGGA-ZIGG-AAAH!

http://www.atlastours.net/iraq/ur_ziggurat.jpg

That one doesn't look very ruined -- looks ready to move right in!

Fairly certain it's been extensively restored. It spent much of its history looking more like...

http://www.odysseyadventures.ca/articles/ur%20of%20the%20chaldees/ur02_ziggurat02.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_d8lD9vT0YjY/SaxHbtq5D1I/AAAAAAAAACc/SGJaho02q0E/s320/gobeklitepe_nov08_4.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_d8lD9vT0YjY/SaxHbtq5D1I/AAAAAAAAACc/SGJaho02q0E/s320/gobeklitepe_nov08_4.jpg

some more gobelki tepe as seen upthread. gosh, this thing truly is fascinating and in the sense of speculation on it's age & origin, surely it's the worlds O.G ruin.
We've tended to chronologise civilisation with agriculturally catalysed systems as base, taking as tidy fact that settlement = more time & energy to practise capabilities not immediately essential towards survival. that type of environmental automation didn't suddenly make people smart, it only offered an alternative system.
as far as it's been explained to me, sedentism didnt directly succeed nomadism, and in some cases i'm sure offered a more productive existence than some early attempts at the ol' settle & build. these guys were nomadic hunters, but their landscape was far more domesticated & systemised than we may be able to project. the acceleration of knowledge & technology has been going since we formed a skeleton, so no doubt when the ecological going was good in the fertile crescent, people learned some v. important business about how things work.
these were clusters of people living off the earth learning of the conditions of things. time, seasons, ecology and how things were ordered.
one thing i love thinking about are the nature of the images. beasts, animals, creatures- things that move and that also, most importantly, die. they're being eternalised with stone, attaching the ephemeral to the eternal. at the height of my obsession with this stuff the phrase 'establishing permanence' kept going round my head, which could be applied towards the c. 11th century norman/benedictine structures itt, such as tintern, where invading powers saught to make a very visible ploy towards 'societal ordinance'. nobody since the romans had used stone in such a way to establish a presence in the landscape that says "uh get used to it. i am literally a part of this place now"
tldr more cool pictures pls

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_d8lD9vT0YjY/Sawhu1VrX9I/AAAAAAAAACM/K_IMVbuhsgQ/s320/gobeklitepe_nov08_520.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_d8lD9vT0YjY/SawVGWfTDzI/AAAAAAAAAB8/c80pjRywWSw/s320/gobeklitepe_nov08_2.jpg

T-DOORS!!!!!! Those are in Anasazi buildings too!

ugh Ive been to all those native american ruins elvis posted before the thread break.. thanks dad for all those awesome summer vacations

Man, if you want some ruin pr0n in your life, I highly recommend "RUIN LUST" currently at the Tate Britain:

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/ruin-lust

Pretty much starts with some epic John Martin ruins, your usual Tintern Abbey and mouldering Coliseum paintings and works its way through RUINED ANTICKUITIES and Soane's ruin of the Bank of England all the way up to Savage Messiah and the Wilson Twins' WWII bunkers.

(My favourite bit, though, to be honest, was reading all the Savage Messiah and Owen Hatherley stuff on the reading table outside.)